This Game We Play
by Winter Sapphire
Summary: Being balanced inside just yourself is only half the journey; it’s finding your balance with another person that leads you the rest of the way down the path. Peter/Claire, canon. AU after 2.3.


Title: This Game We Play  
Characters/Paring: Peter/Claire  
Rating: PG  
Word Count: 3092  
Dislcaimer: Don't own Heroes! Sorry. :(  
Spoilers/Warnings: Only season 1/2 events strewn throughout. It has some seriously AU moments, but for the most part it's canon until 2.3.  
A.N: This is the expanded version of my fic Dualities, written for a Philosophy assignment. If the beginning seems a little school-ish to you... well, there's the reason. XD I hope you guys enjoy it. :)

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The chakras are an interesting part of spirituality; they need balance to stay in line, and without that balance they are thrown off track. Two halves of the same whole are needed to be together for each of the seven, none of them necessarily evil, but all of them necessary. It's like a yin-yang--you can't have one half without the other, or else the entire world, or your entire world, will be thrown off-kilter.

People assume that the affects of these are confined to the decisions and actions of one person, that it's in an individual's own power that they're affected. But the truth is, chakras are just as much about a balance of the world and people around you as it is about the balance of your inner spirituality.

Being balanced inside just yourself is only half the journey; it's finding your balance with another person that leads you the rest of the way down the path, so they can catch you when you start to trip and fall.

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_**root;** the root chakra is the balance of survival and fear; they say that in order to survive you have to live without fear, yet without the feeling of fear how will you have the urge to survive?_

_FEAR;_

She thought she had given up fear, traded it in when she found out she was virtually indestructible (the achilles heel on the back of her head barely counts, she thinks, since the odds of being struck there are one in a million now that she's aware). It didn't seem to make sense to live a life full of fear when she could walk through fire and not get burned. When you can escape death, what else is there to fear?

Except now death's come running for her, stalking and preying on her like a trophy it wants to display on a silver pedestal for all to see. She looks straight at the face of death, and it's the most frightening thing she's ever seen. A switch inside of her that's been flicked off for so long suddenly jams up, and her will to survive is more overwhelming than it has been at any other point in her life that she can remember.

She has two choices: _fight_, or _flight_. The urge to run comes back to her so simply it was like it never even disappeared.

She chooses flight.

_SURVIVAL;_

He was always a frightful child; he'd had nightmares up until he was ten or eleven, horrible nightmares that made him appreciate each day he had more and more. His brother had helped him through it, been there for him when his parents had been too busy or out at one of their social functions.

But he had gotten over those fears with time; eventually, they all just faded away. He became a dreamer, an idealist who was always looking towards a brighter future. He still is, really, but his future doesn't look so bright. In fact, it looks pretty grisly, with him in a broken, tangled heap on the ground. He wonders why he's even considering throwing his life away for some girl he's never met.

Except, now she's running at him with death on her heels, covered in blood and face streaked with tears mixed from fear and grief, and it all makes perfect sense.

People who say the will to survive is blocked by fear must be wrong, he thinks, because as he shouts at her to run and leave him, to save herself, he knows he's going to die. He knows he's going to die for her.

It's his destiny, and it doesn't scare him at all.

_**spleen;** the spleen chakra is a balance of pleasure and guilt; people say it's hard to feel pleasure when you're held back by guilt, and maybe they're right. Yet, you can still find pleasure in the deepest pits of guilt, and you can still find guilt in the simplest of pleasures._

_PLEASURE;_

She looks at him like he's the only person in the world who can understand her, and maybe he is. She knows she's never felt closer to anyone before in her life, never trusted somebody so unconditionally and wholly. He saved her life, died for her when he didn't even know her name, and she had been so scared she wouldn't get to know the hero who had been willing to sacrifice everything for her.

But he's still alive, recovered as if he hadn't ever been injured in his life, and she spends every free minute that she has with him. She drags him to movies with her on the weekends, takes walks around Central Park with her arm linked cordially through his, stays up late in the family mansion (_very large house_, he always corrects her) talking to him about everything and nothing. They're simple pleasures, things that she's sure most people would take for granted, but she cherishes each moment like it's the last they'll ever have.

She's been infatuated before, but never in love, and the immense feeling of pleasure it brings her makes her feel like the happiest person alive.

_GUILT;_

He has to fight the urge to flinch every time she touches him, every time he clutches her to him in an embrace. He hates that he has to feel guilty about touching her, hates that Destiny has been playing her favourite game of cat and mouse when it comes to the two of them. They were thrown together in the midst of the beginning of the end, and the only person he could count on to make sense of it all was her. Then Destiny threw a curveball, and just as he was beginning to fall she suddenly became unaccessible.

He can deal with that, though. He knows he can. He is ready and willing to be the best friend she has ever had, even if it means nothing can ever happen between them. But he knows, he knows without a doubt, that each time she touches his shoulder, each time she loops her arm through his or pokes him jokingly in the stomach, that she loves him just as much as he loves her.

He hates that he has to pretend he doesn't realize, hates that he can't tell her that he wants more than anything to never stop touching her, and the fact that he keeps that secret hidden from her makes him feel more guilt than touching her ever could.

But she can never know, they can never happen, and he'll take the secret to his grave.

_**solar plexus;** the solar plexus chakra is the balance between willpower and shame; you must have a strong will to persevere in this world, and shame is supposedly supposed to block that will from being at its full strength. But what is a soul without shame? How can you know what to fight for when you don't feel shame for fighting for things you shouldn't?_

_WILLPOWER;_

He's always had a strong will, always had the strength to stand his ground when he knew what he wanted or when he knew what was right. Sure, he's always been in the shadows of his brother, but he never wanted to be in the spotlight. At least not in that way. He's always managed to achieve his goals, even when it went against what everyone else expected of him.

Except now she's in his life. He has a hard time saying no to her about anything, and part of him knows that could be problematic. The other part doesn't really care, doesn't care that he'd do anything for her, anything she asked, without even a first thought, let alone a second. It scares him that he succumbs to her so easily. Scares him that he doesn't even want to fight whatever this hold she has on him is.

He can feel himself breaking--maybe not in the physical sense, but there are falter lines running up and down his veins. Each day, each _minute_, her pull becomes stronger and stronger and it becomes harder and harder for him to block the illicit thoughts from his mind, and he tries desperately to hold on.

But his willpower is slowly crumbling, and he's not sure anymore if he's strong enough to keep it from breaking completely.

_SHAME;_

She's clinging to him tightly, refusing to let him go no matter how much his eyes plead with her to just give up. She's not an idiot, she knows that whatever it is she wants is impossible, improbable at best, but she doesn't really care. She's long given up the prospect that anything about her is normal, and this is just another thing to throw on top of the pile. Shame doesn't matter to her anymore. She's already gone through more than she had ever imagined, seen more than she would have ever wanted, and if wanting _him_ is her price to pay, then she's willing to pay it in full.

She's flirting with Fate, with Destiny, with Good Karma and Bad Karma or whatever it is people call it, and no matter how much she knows she should feel ashamed she can't bring herself to stop. She never asked for this to happen to them, never asked for him to save her or for her to fall in love with him, but it's happened and now she knows there's no turning back.

She doesn't care how wrong it is. She's connected to him on so many levels, in ways she's never been connected to anyone before. How could that be wrong?

_**heart;** the heart chakra is a balance between love and grief; sometimes people say that if you grieve then you've forgotten how to love, but when you're remembering somebody you loved is gone... is it even possible not to show grief?_

_GRIEF;_

She cries herself to sleep every night, heart aching with a hollowness that can't be filled anymore. She hates it, hates the fact that he could die for her but she couldn't save him. She was so sure he would be fine that she never even considered the possibility that he wouldn't. It tears her apart inside, knowing that if she could have just pulled the trigger he might have been able to come back to himself.

But she couldn't, and now the one person who she could count on to remain around for her eternity is gone, disappeared in a ball of light never to be seen or heard from again. The grief is overwhelming, the pain so stabbing that she wishes she _could_ die, if only to put herself out of this misery.

But she can't, and she's never felt more alone.

_LOVE;_

He wakes up in the middle of a shipyard in Ireland, half naked and with no memory to speak of, no name to go by. He doesn't know who he is or where he's from--or why he has such a knack for art, but he does, and it's the only clue that gives him any sense of who he is.

All he draws is her--the beautiful blonde girl with the sad, little smile. He draws her eating, he draws her sleeping, he draws her angry and sad and smiling and frowning. He's sketched her broken face more times than he can count, and it pains him that he doesn't know who _she_ is, why she's so important to him that, when he can't remember anything else, he can remember her.

He may not know her name, but he knows, with every fiber of his being, that he must love her more than anything in the world.

_**throat;** the throat chakra is set around the balance of truths and lies; even in a lie there is a semblance of truth, a part that can't be wiped away no matter how much you try._

_LIES;_

She's missed him so much that when he shows up knocking at her door she doesn't know how to respond; she just stands there, shell-shocked and silent, as he watches her from beneath his crinkled brow. His gaze is so intense that she can't really _think_ to do anything else.

It's only when he kisses her that she responds, clutching at him desperately and repeating his name like a mantra again and again against his lips. He's clinging to her so tightly, pulling her flush against him, and she knows that he must not remember why this can't happen, why it shouldn't be happening, because he would have _never_ let this happen before he disappeared.

But she doesn't push him away. She's waited so long for this that she doesn't even try to correct the lies he must believe.

_TRUTH;_

She must not realize he can read minds because she's thinking the truth so clearly, so painfully clearly. Everything about the two of them, everything they've shared and everything they haven't, is written so plainly in her thoughts that he can't help but glean them. He's not sure what to make of it, not sure what to think when the truth is staring him so blindly in the face.

But even though he believed a lie he had concocted for himself, the way she clutches for him just as desperately as he clutches for her makes him believe that maybe all of it wasn't false, that maybe there had been, that there _is_, some semblance of truth inside of it. He can't fight emotions, and right now his emotions are telling him that even if she wasn't who he thought she was he still loves her, still needs her. Holding her is like coming home.

So he brings her closer, because if there's any truth he knows for sure it's that she needs him just as much as he needs her.

_**third eye;** the third eye chakra is the balance of illusion and insight; people believe that living your life under a false illusion doesn't give you much insight to the world, but who's to say it can't give you more? Who's to say insight isn't enhanced when you look at things in a different way?_

_ILLUSION;_

It doesn't take her long to realize that he's discovered the truth, but by then it's too late to turn back--too late to make things better. They're both in too deep, and she knows that there's nothing they can do about it now. So she lives her life under the illusion that he doesn't remember anything, lives her life under the illusion that they're a normal family--or as normal as they can be, anyway.

It's easier this way, for the both of them. Maybe it's selfish of her to want to keep it all a secret, stored safely away in the back of the highest cabinet, but it's what she has to do.

It's easier to pretend that everything's normal then to face the reality that it's not.

_INSIGHT;_

He plays along; it's not hard, really. It's what his heart wants, even while his mind is screaming something entirely different at him. He's always been one to trust his heart over his head, and this time it's not any different. He smiles at her, laughs with her, kisses her without abandon and without remorse.

He doesn't feel guilt anymore; being with her gives him more insight to this world he has been thrust back into suddenly, gives him more insight to these things he can do--gives him more insight to _her_, too, if he has to think about it. He gleans things every now and then, bits and pieces of her memories of the two of them before his memory got wiped.

It gives him the comfort of knowing that, if they had continued on the same trail they had before, if he hadn't of forgotten, then they would probably still have wound up in the same place they are now.

_**crown;** the crown chakra is the balance of pure cosmic energy and earthly attachment; you're supposed to let go of those earthly things you're attached to in order to make room for power you can't explain, but if you don't have attachments to the things on this earth what would you use its energy to protect?_

_PURE COSMIC ENERGY;_

Hundreds of years pass, and he still doesn't look a day older than twenty-six. She doesn't look a day older than eighteen. Sometimes it still surprises him, the fact that they could very much have an eternity together, that even after all these years he's still he most powerful human being on the planet.

He has pure cosmic energy at his fingertips, pure cosmic energy that could destroy the world in the hands of one and heal it in another's. It's overwhelming, and sometimes he's afraid that he'll fall prey to the promise of power these abilities give him. It's only when she smiles at him, unconditionally trusting and loving, that he manages to quell his fears.

He may have the pure energy of the world at his fingertips, but he knows he would give it all up in an instant for her. It had taken him centuries to realize that, no matter how much forward they moved in time, that everything was always going to be about her.

_EARTHLY ATTACHMENT;_

There had been a time that she had thought she'd be going through her life alone, that he wouldn't be able to stay beside her and she'd lose herself in the spiraling of the world. She was so sure that, with time, all of the world would have lost its meaning, that all of her earthly attachments would just wear away into nothing.

But he's still here, standing beside her as the world spirals on, and she knows that it's because of him that she's been able to stay grounded. She knows it's because of him that she can still look out on the world and still see some beauty, that she doesn't have to dwell on the throbbing darkness she's seen through her years.

There will never been anything in her life that she will be more grateful for than him.

-------

They balance each other, two halves of the same whole coming together for eternity. Maybe some people can be balanced within just themselves, maybe they don't need another person to keep them from tripping down the path, but it makes _them_ both stronger when they know they have each other.

That's all the balance they need.


End file.
